Lizzy Enders

Lizzy Enders is the first-person narrator whose attention to grief, abandonment, and the disputed staircase miracle holds the novel’s questions of belief and doubt together. She watches her father dig a grave with one arm, is later left at the convent, and then helps bring a hungry carpenter into the conversation about the staircase. At the end, she does not accept the claim that the carpenter was Saint Joseph, but the blind cat’s restored sight prevents her skepticism from becoming a simple answer.

Identity and Early Experience

Lizzy’s earliest scenes establish a child trying to understand losses before she has words for them. At the grave, her father digs with one arm while she watches alongside Elinora. The physical fact is plain, but the scene does not explain the cause of his lost arm or make it the center of his identity. Instead, attention falls on the family’s shared presence at the burial and on the child observing what the adults are doing.

Later, when whispers suggest her father has heard something, he grips her shoulder, mistaking her quiet for grief. Lizzy tells him she is all right; in retrospect, she acknowledges that she does not yet know what grief is, and that it will come later. The difference between the child’s immediate response and the narrator’s understanding gives the memory its shape: she can report the gesture as it happened while recognizing that its meaning exceeded what she could then comprehend.

That later grief is joined by separation. Lizzy is told that her father has not forgotten her but has decided to leave her with the convent, and that he could not tell her himself because he thought this was best. The explanation offers a reason for his absence without undoing its effect. The contrast with the earlier shoulder-grip is pointed: the father who once tries to comfort her is no longer present to explain his decision directly.

Life at the Convent and Acts of Initiative

Lizzy’s account of returning to the convent with Violate Lacey gives her a compact but active role. She introduces herself and invites Violate to come back with her. The exchange presents Lizzy not only as a child receiving care or instruction, but as someone capable of offering companionship and taking the lead in a moment of return.

Her outsider status becomes especially visible in her conversation with Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy. Though the conversation is pleasant, Lizzy senses that he is measuring her. She responds inwardly by deciding to demonstrate her mettle, refusing the possibility that he might dismiss her as another insincere girl. The scene makes her alertness a form of self-assertion: she reads the social test and resolves to meet it on her own terms.

The staircase problem turns that resolve into practical participation. The nuns have prayed a novena to Saint Joseph, and the Bishop says that people look to him for miracles, though he cannot perform them. He considers Lizzy’s outsider perspective potentially useful and proposes that the hungry carpenter inspect the staircase. The episode places her between an institutional dilemma and a practical intervention: the problem is not settled by prayer alone, and the carpenter’s hunger is treated as a source of vision rather than a reason to disregard him. Lizzy’s involvement brings the beggar-man carpenter into the story of the staircase, though the available account does not make her the sole author of the solution.

The Carpenter and the Staircase

The novel’s staircase plot draws on the Santa Fe legend of a mysterious carpenter who built a staircase in the Chapel of Loretto after the chapel was completed in 1878 without a way to reach its choir loft. Within Lizzy’s story, the staircase gathers several kinds of explanation: practical need, religious expectation, and the possibility of a miracle. The nuns pray, the Bishop acknowledges the limits of his power, and a hungry carpenter is asked to look at the work. These responses coexist without the narrative making them interchangeable.

When the other girls and nuns stand at the back of the church gazing up at the staircase, Mother Magdalena announces that the carpenter was Saint Joseph. Lizzy’s account immediately marks her distance from that conclusion: she does not believe it. Her skepticism is direct, but the narration does not turn it into a final verdict on every extraordinary element of the episode.

One exception complicates her disbelief. The carpenter had held a blind cat, and the cat was no longer blind afterward. The closing commentary identifies this as the small window of belief that remains open to Lizzy. The detail does not prove the carpenter’s identity, and Lizzy’s response is not presented as a conversion. Rather, the cat becomes a counterweight to the group’s certainty: she can reject the claim that the visitor was Saint Joseph while still facing an event that her skepticism does not resolve.

Unresolved Belief and Narrative Role

Lizzy’s importance lies partly in the space between the community’s explanation and her own judgment. Mother Magdalena speaks for a collective interpretation of the staircase; Lizzy does not join it. Yet neither does the ending close the matter by demonstrating that the miraculous explanation is false. The novel leaves the carpenter’s identity unsettled, just as the historical legend remains open to competing interpretations.

The closing commentary asks whether Lizzy believes when she leaves the convent and leaves the question unanswered. That uncertainty suits a narrator whose understanding has changed over time: at the grave she says she does not yet know grief, while later narration can name what came afterward. At the staircase, however, greater experience does not produce a neat resolution. Lizzy retains both judgment and a narrow opening for wonder, and the reader is left to decide what the carpenter’s work means.